The Late Night host talks with GQ's Jeanne Marie Laskas about his days on SNL, late night comedy, and growing up in a strict Irish Catholic household

At Frankies Spuntino restaurant in
Brooklyn, Jimmy Fallon orders the
peppers with anchovies to share.
"So great. Phenomenal. You will not
believe." it's a homey place, tight and
worn, unmistakably Brooklyn cool, and not
far from the new Barclays Center arena,
where we're headed next to watch a Nets-Lakers game. "You haven't been there yet?"
Fallon says. "No? No. It's so great!" He claps.
Clap clap clap. "I get to introduce you." He
looks back at the menu. "So, some meatballs? Eggplant parm? We'll just do some
aps, get to the game by halftime? Whatever
you want. Easy. Easy-peasy." It is impossible
to disagree with him.

Fallon says he's kind of ADD: "Not, like,
diagnosed. Just my personality. Like, I read
one chapter of a book and put it down.
Thank God for Kindle." At 38 he still has
a chiseled face, no bags, no fatigue, and
he holds his shoulders high, like he's in
a state of constant inhale, cocked and
loaded and ready to deliver you a gift. He is joyful, easy, breezy, and if there is a buzz
about him now, it is in the context of the Leno-Letterman game of chicken—both
of their contracts are up in 2014. Anyone
paying attention can see that the famously
improbable Fallon is getting groomed for
the Tonight Show throne. Even Late Night
executive producer Lorne Michaels concedes as much: "I'm not allowed to say it—yet. But I think there's an inevitability to it.
He's the closest to Carson that I've seen of
this generation."

Fallon and I are just coming from a Late
Night taping, where the audience was
small, maybe 200 people, and the feel was
intimate. "The biggest star on the planet!"
Fallon said, and the blue curtain parted
and out came Justin Bieber, doe-eyed,
with a pompadour, skeleton arms jangling
out of a camo jacket. "I missed you, man,"
Fallon said to him and told him how awesome he was, and then it was time to go
on over and shoot random items at a basketball hoop—an iced cappuccino, a big
bowl of ramen noodles. Noodles? Bieber
missed every shot, but Fallon went girlie-underhand with his noodles, heaved, and
the great blast of yellow flew through the air, free, gross, slimy—the whole thing was
so stupid, so inane—and yet the Fallon gospel was clear: It's okay, America. It's okay
to lie there in your bed hoping with all
your heart that some friggin' noodles plop
through a basketball hoop. The noodles
swished through the net, became entangled, a kind of satisfying vomit, and all the
people cheered.

···

"I'm so happy right now. So happy," Fallon
says. The peppers have arrived. A plate of
four lying like limp soldiers in olive oil. "It's
good, right?" Then the clap—clap clap clap.

Fallon tells me about first starting Late
Night, how he knew audiences were dubious. "They were like, 'Jimmy Fallon?' " He
had killed during his six-season run on
SNL, from 1998 to 2004, alongside Will
Ferrell, Tracy Morgan, Amy Poehler, and
"Weekend Update" co-anchor Tina Fey.
Then he left to go do movies (Fever Pitch,
Taxi) that tanked, and which made Lorne
Michaels's selecting him for Late Night all the weirder. NBC hated the idea at first, but
Michaels was bullheaded; he would only
do the show with Fallon.

"NBC was like, 'This is going to flop,' "
Fallon recalls. " 'This is going to be like
Chevy Chase's show.' " That legendary catastrophe was pulled from the air after just one
month. "They were comparing me to that."

The point is, Fallon knew he was an
odd choice—he got it. He had his writers
use it almost immediately. "You loved him
on SNL!" show announcer Steve Higgins
declared in an early skit. "You hated him in
the movies! Now you're ambivalent."

Fallon wasn't edgy. Fallon wasn't dark or
complicated. Fallon was perhaps too cute
for late-night audiences used to hanging
out with the snarky, cool crowd. "Yeah, the
cool crowd was always beyond my grasp,"
he says. He means this literally. "Like, my
parents had a fence, a chain-link fence, and
my sister and I were not allowed outside it."
This was in upstate New York—Saugerties,
Irish Catholic, strict. "I was only allowed to
ride my bike in my backyard," he says. He
rode in a circle, round and round, carving
a dirt track. "Like Gus the polar bear at the
zoo? That was me. Kids would say, 'What
are you doing, man? Come out.' I was like,
'I can't.' We got a rope swing. On a tree. We
had to wear football helmets to ride the
swing. Kids could see us. They would pull up
on their bikes so they could watch the Fallon
kids, so weird. You know, 'Why are you wearing football helmets?' We're like, 'So we
don't hit our heads!' "

His parents had parties; that was the
entertainment. "Parties where everyone drinks and performs. I did a Rodney
Dangerfield act." He studied Dangerfield's
No Respect album—minus the curse words.
His dad, as family lore goes, had located all
the bad words on the vinyl recording and
painstakingly scratched them out with a car
key. "I would listen over and over. I didn't
know what the word was. I didn't care. I
wanted the jokes."

A little song, a little dance, a little seltzer
in your pants, said the quote under his high
school yearbook picture. He dropped out of
college his senior year to pursue comedy in
L.A., where Michaels found him, laughed at his Adam Sandler impersonation, even
though Michaels famously never laughed
during auditions. Seeing Michaels bury
his face in his hands, crack up like that, it
answered everything. "Every birthday cake
I cut," he says. "Every shooting star, every
coin in the fountain, I wished: SNL."

On the show, he was the guy who
couldn't keep it together, who laughed during sketches. "Definitely a comedy foul.
Lorne didn't like it. I didn't like it. But the
sketches I laughed in became popular.
At the end, it was like the audience was
waiting. The studio started to shake. Like
an earthquake. I couldn't hold it in anymore. Torture."

People criticized him for it, but audiences didn't care. Fallon's brand of comedy
included the audience in the experience,
and that, it would turn out, was prescient.
"On Late Night, it's like we're all in on the
joke," he says "That's what I wanted it to be. I'm not doing
something sneaky. Inside jokes, I don't like
those. We can all ride together, and everyone's on the same thing going, 'Aha, I know
where you're going here.' And if we get weird,
everyone knows, 'Okay, we'll go for that little
ride of being weird.' Or if I go, okay, I'm going
to try to be Neil Young and sing 'Pants on the
Ground.' We're all just going to ride it out,
laugh, and we're going to be like, 'This is so
silly,' but it's happening.